


choking on death

by powdermilkrory



Category: Cars (Movies)
Genre: Angst, Backstory, Character Study, HIV/AIDS, Minor Character Death, Original Character(s), Past, San Francisco, and he makes me sad, i love doc hudson
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-18
Updated: 2019-06-18
Packaged: 2020-05-14 08:32:30
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 343
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19269556
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/powdermilkrory/pseuds/powdermilkrory
Summary: You think you’re sick of working in a clinic where hallowed out men shuffle through the door, where there’s a horrible unspoken truth hovering in the air like dust particles in the waiting room. You are sick of choking on death.





	choking on death

There are broken things that rattle around inside your chest, and there is a fine layer of numb coated over every square inch of your body. You remember in 1986 sometimes, that boy Michael who made you laugh, who convinced you to stay in San Francisco and then died a week later. You think of trying to belong in San Francisco. You remember the fear. You think of all the funerals and you staying home. You remember your 100 square foot apartment and the springy couch you bought at a second-hand store. You think of the loneliness, even in a city full of people just like you. 

Your mother called you every December and every July. When you talked, both of you pretended like you talked every day, updating each other on your everyday life things. Her new husband and your medical school, her little dog Pedro and the mold that crept into everything you had. You flew to North Dakota for her funeral when Mark, her husband, called you one day in June. Your beard, deep brown and full back then, tasted like tears and old. You began to feel old, then, like bird bones and brittle pine needles. Sometimes, despite your doctor mind, after years of racing, you wanted to spray W-D40 on your knees, ease the rust between your joints. You wanted to rub wax into your scars, cover the ugly hurting things up until everything shone again. 

Coming back to your apartment in San Francisco after hanging in the shadows of your own mother’s funeral, you think you’re sick of living in places you don’t belong. You think you’re sick of working in a clinic where hollowed out men shuffle through the door, where there’s a horrible unspoken truth hovering in the air like dust particles in the waiting room. You are sick of choking on death. And so you haul the old couch and place it on the sidewalk. You press your hand to it, leaving your fingerprints on it one more time, and then you drive away.

**Author's Note:**

> yeah thanks, sorry for the angst fest! i feel like doc moved to san francisco for a moment before he lived in radiator springs and i think he would have HATED it, you know, living in a place where everyone was always so open and proud and loud and i think that scared him a lot? he wanted to find a place where he could belong, but he never quite felt like he was enough? like he wasn't gay enough, or loud enough, or brave enough. idk! i think san francisco would have made him uncomfortable because he was so used to hiding and being shameful and also! i feel like he didn't really have any friends in san francisco anyways so he didn't have any funerals to go to or anyone to relate to and he kind of just felt,,, like the opposite of trapped? exposed maybe? idk! i kind of thought this would be when doc realized he did need a home and he needed to find it and then he found radiator springs just after this i guess!  
> also i just went to my grandmother's funeral so funerals are like,,, fresh in my mind rn and this was all i could think about!


End file.
